Light 'Cloud'
Berkeley Rep skims the surface of Caryl Churchill's satire.

By Brad Rosenstein

ANYONE WHO LOVES theater has had them: those magical playgoing nights that haunt you for the rest of your life and leave you forever hungry to repeat the experience. For me, one of those nights happened more than 20 years ago when I saw the original New York production of Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine. I have a sense memory of sitting in the Theatre de Lys and experiencing a feeling of perfectly escalating joy. I was blown away by the play's adventurousness, its hilarious and compassionate explorations of time and identity and sexuality and class. To this day I can still hear the inflections of the superb ensemble and remember nuances of Tommy Tune's flawless direction. I vividly recall being enveloped by that intoxicating sense of well-being, when you know you are in expert artistic hands leading you on a rich and surprising journey.

Needless to say, it's an experience that happens all too seldom in the theater – and it can also ruin you for any future exposure to the play. I've sat through many disappointing productions of Cloud Nine since – how could they not be? But I'm always ready to encounter the play anew and looked forward to Berkeley Repertory Theatre's new mounting. You'd think anything by Churchill – particularly this feast of social satire bridging the British-dominated Africa of 1880 and the London of 1980 – would be a natural for director Tony Taccone, who's been on a roll lately. Instead, Taccone plays the evening mostly for laughs, skimming lightly over the piece's lyricism and depth.

The tropical heat of Africa seems to stymie the colonial ambitions of Clive and his family and friends just as it sends their libidos into overdrive, provoking all kinds of instantaneous couplings. It's the stuff of farce, and that's largely how it's played here, but Churchill has much more on her mind, from the uneasy politics to the queasy romanticism spawned by the collision of cultures, classes, and sexual proclivities. While never neglecting the comedy, Churchill deepens things in the second act, which shifts to London 100 years later. But for the characters it's only 25 years later, and they struggle with self-fulfillment while toting the baggage of the past.

Timothy Crowe's Clive is a masterful Victorian caricature, and his presence is missed in the second act, when Crowe becomes a one-note little girl. Danny Scheie as Clive's wife, Betty, is very funny melding a fluttery Victorian sensibility with the acid inflections of Maggie Smith, but he never projects the genuine yearnings that would prepare us for Betty's later flowering. Stacy Ross is wonderfully specific and free in multiple roles, and Cynthia Strickland is sharp and sensitive throughout, but it's Fred Sullivan Jr. who does the evening's most striking work. As the sexually adaptable explorer Harry and his second-act counterpart, Martin, Sullivan strikes shifty-eyed gold. Previously, Martin had never emerged for me as more than a pallid sketch of the hypersensitive 1980s male, but Sullivan captures the seething anger that makes this character pop into focus.

It's easy – and misguided – to dismiss Cloud Nine as dated. One of its central subjects is, in fact, the relativity of time in affecting public and private attitudes. Great plays similarly shift in relevance to the times: at its premiere, Cloud Nine was a stunning reflection on the personal cost of Britain's imperialism and of its hypocritical Victorian morality. The play's fluid vision of unbridled sexuality seemed liberating then, only to mark the script as an apparent period piece in ensuing years. But today what comes through most potently is not the sex or the politics but the hilarious and painful choices the play's parents and children and lovers (and by extension, governments and citizens and generations) make in dealing with one another.

"It's the loneliness here," Betty says of Africa, attempting to explain away her children's governess's attraction to her, "and the climate is very confusing." Despite all appearances, the play seems to say, things haven't changed much, not in the 100 years that the play spans – or the 20 years since Cloud Nine first appeared. Likewise, while I will never have the pleasure of again seeing that first performance except in memory, perhaps what I need from the play has irrevocably changed as well. I continue to long for another production that will sound the play's continuously relevant depths in ways as fresh and exciting as Churchill's own.

'Cloud Nine' runs through July 28. Tues. and Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m. (also Thurs/20, Sat/22, June 29, July 11, 18, and 27, 2 p.m.; no show Fri/21), Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk. $10-$54. (510) 647-2949.